It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m standing too close to the shoulder of I-15 in the middle of the Mojave desert. The trucks that blow past shake the car and send a gust of warm wind in my hair, up my skirt and in my face. Dirt kicks up and I use both my hands to cover my eyes. The car we are driving just broke. The wheel came unhinged while I was driving, but I won’t know that until I get out of the car. All I heard was a clunking noise that sounded like the transmission dropping. I quickly pointed the car to the side of the road and out of the way of traffic as best I could. The bent tire left twenty feet of thick black stripes across the pavement, showing the point of impact to final resting place. I am waiting for James to finish inspecting the damage and for us to go home in the rental car we picked up four days earlier because the car whose wheel just busted also had it’s transmission go out just days earlier. This is the second trip out to Barstow. Now we will have to make a third. We’re racking up hours on the highway and exhaustion is creeping up on me.
Heat has a milking weight that sucks energy out of you, like being shrink wrapped. Nothing, with the exception of gusts of air conditioning in the nearby Starbucks can shake the desert off of you. However, I’ve decided for the moment to sit outside the car repair shop in hopes the mechanic will walk up to me in five minutes and say everything is good to go. I push my legs into the sun. They are tan. They are cooked from summer. I cannot wait till it ends.
NO SAINTS IN L.A. 